Fortifying the Cloud with Big Data Computing; Exploring the Opacity of the Cloud

Despite the cloud’s prevalence in modern society, concerns about privacy and security persist among users. To address these concerns, robust access monitoring and efficient querying strategies are essential. Leveraging Lucene on Amazon Web Services (AWS), I examined the feasibility of a scalable indexing and querying strategy. While this approach simplifies deployment, challenges such as Lambda's time, memory, and concurrency limits cause index file proliferation and unresponsive subsequent querying. To overcome these limitations, future work involves exploring alternative running environments like AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) Serverless to enhance scalability and performance.

Furthermore, despite the cloud’s integration with everyday life, there seems to be a widespread lack of understanding of the cloud. By utilizing various sociotechnical theories, such as the Social Construction of Technology and Engineering as Social Experimentation, this study aimed to reveal the hiddenness of cloud infrastructure and how it affects residents, businesses, and policymakers. Through an exploration of relevant groups such as Dominion Energy, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), this study identified diverse interests and interpretations of cloud impact on Virginia's economy, electricity supply, and ecology. These findings emphasize the importance of increasing technosocial awareness and encourage stakeholders to make more informed decisions about how to live well with emerging technologies.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Technical Advisor: Briana Morrison

STS Advisor: William Davis